The Help at Rollins College

On January 19th, I attended a screening of The Help at Rollins College, which was presented as part of Rollins' week of Martin Luther King Jr. Day-related events. The screening included a discussion, which I stayed for, and I also won a raffle drawing for a copy of the novel.

The plot of the film involves an aspiring white journalist in 1960s Jackson, Mississippi who seeks to establish herself as a writer by reporting on the experiences of the ubiquitous black maids in that community. The film explores the racism experienced by these maids, as well as the expectations about dating and appearance that constrain the journalist herself. The key theme of the film is the intimate bonds formed between white children and the black maids who are their primary caregivers.

I did spend most of the film under the impression that it was one of those "based on a true story" pieces, and that the collection of stories was an actual thing that was published during the 1960s. It was somewhat disappointing to check the blurb on the novel and see that it is actually a recently-published fiction novel with no necessary connection to the stories of real people. But at the same time, it's somewhat reassuring; the characters in the movie—especially the villains—sometimes came across as cartoonish, and the overall effect was a Disney-fied presentation of racism as a straightforward issue. Racists and other bigots in today's real world almost always seem to have complicated rationalizations that allow them to explain their views in ways that seem superficially fair and justified, as a defense mechanism which shields them from confronting the fact that they actually are terrible people. The film's villains have none of that self-consciousness; they are racist because they are just plain Bad and Ignorant, and in that sense the film seems to fail to present the actual reality of racism in the period.

The black protagonists of the film sometimes seem to live rather one-dimensional lives as well, and there has been some criticism of the film from that perspective by online writers—for example, this article in The Rumpus by Roxane Gay. Gay criticizes the inaccurate use of dialect, the erasure of black women's active participation in the Civil Rights Movement, and the absence of men as significant characters in the film—no white men are presented as culpable for the state of race relations or as sources for the sexual violence that characterized the lives of historical domestic workers, and no black men are seen sharing the struggle with the women. Only one black woman is mentioned as having a husband, and he is abusive and never seen on-screen. (Gay does not mention the community's male pastor who offers advice to the maids at a few points in the plot.) Many of the same criticisms are also made in a statement by the Association of Black Women Historians.

Overall, Gay's critique focuses on film's use of the "magical negro" trope, in which black characters are used as wise facilitators for a white protagonist's spiritual journey. The implication is that this parallels the reasons for the real-world popularity of the novel and film. At the screening Gay attended, the theater was filled with white women talking excitedly about the novel, as though consuming this Hollywood product is sufficient to render them better and more culturally-aware people.

Whether or not this is the dynamic at work nationwide, it was not particularly apparent at the Rollins screening. The audience at Rollins seemed culturally mixed, with what was probably a narrow black majority, and no one from any background noted any of the issues identified by Gay's critique in the discussion afterward. The discussion was primarily focused on older audience members sharing their memories of segregation, with very little direct reference to the events of the film. One person posed the question early on of whether and how parents should explain the history of segregation to their children, and much of the discussion that followed touched on that topic. The fact that the period portrayed in the film occurred in living memory and there were people present who spoke about it from personal experience did make the film seem much more real than it might have in isolation.

In spite of the issues with the film identified by writers like Gay, the fact that it did inspire conversations like those that occurred after the Rollins screening do suggest that its popularity may be a positive phenomenon overall. Unrealistic though it may be, sometimes that is not necessarily the expectation of fiction. If it is not taken as literal history in itself, but rather as inspiration for conversations about people's own experiences of history, then it has achieved what stories about the past are best suited to do.